We also must immediately wean ourselves off fossil fuels; coal, natural gas, and oil—and invest in a combination of decentralized renewable energy; solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, micro-hydro and liquid fuels made from waste and other sustainable feedstocks.

Water-intensive, mono-crop, petrochemical industrial agriculture has decimated our topsoil and created dead zones in the oceans. The simplest, most natural and likely the most effective way to sequester carbon is to rebuild soil. Regenerative organic-farming practices build soil. Some of the methods used to accelerate nature's intelligent soil-development process include compost, biochar, brown coal, Mycorrhizal fungi, vermiculture and managed livestock.

If food waste was a country, it would be the third biggest greenhouse-gas emitter behind the U.S. and China. Diverting organic waste from landfills and livestock manure from ponds in anaerobic digesters, compost, and pyrolysis can amend soil vitality while reducing methane.

While these changes might seem challenging, we do have the capacity—if we can only galvanize the will. Many communities have already begun implementing some of these solutions. But top-down change is also essential if we are to address the climate crisis with the speed and scale needed. For this to happen, citizens must insist on getting the influence of money out of politics and the legislative process.

Maximizing regional self-sufficiency with these agricultural practices and energy production methods will strengthen local economies, make them more resilient, help prevent global conflict, and ease the sense of scarcity and the economic burden increasingly felt by the majority.

Cutting Greenhouse-Gas Emissions Can Be Compatible With Economic Growth

CHRISTINE WHITMAN: We should reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions in a way that ensures we continue economic growth, which is entirely possible. We also need to monitor land use—few people focus on that element, but it is a significant factor.

Christine Todd Whitman was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003. She is currently president of Whitman Strategy Group, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies find solutions to environmental challenges.

ENLARGE

Voters: Stop Electing Global-Warming Deniers

BILL RITTER: There are a variety of things Americans can do in their personal lives to reduce the size of their carbon footprint. Using less fossil-fuel energy, buying or leasing a solar system for a residence, and purchasing green-energy credits to offset personal carbon emissions are all examples of personal action to reduce the emissions responsible for global warming. But I think the single biggest issue we have in this country regarding global warming is a political one. There is a definite unwillingness by many of our political leaders and public officeholders to publicly acknowledge that global warming exists, or if it does exist, that it is caused by human activity.

Public polling in America demonstrates that a majority of Americans believe the science of global warming. Further, the polls tell us that Americans regard clean energy as an appropriate way to address our carbon emissions. Yet Congress' failure to act on comprehensive clean-energy legislation to address global warming proves that not enough elected officeholders have been held accountable on election day for their denier status. Until Americans begin to vote based on how the candidate feels about global warming, the issue will have less political intensity than it merits, and we will pass up the opportunity to address this solvable problem.

Regulation Won't Reduce Global Warming

TODD MYERS: The consensus among scientists is that humans "contribute to," not cause, global warming. Temperatures began rising, and glaciers receding, in about 1860, long before CO2 emissions from human activity had any impact. Global temperatures change due to a mix of natural and human-caused forces. There is still debate about the magnitude of impacts from the human-caused portion of climate change.

Therefore, the best environmental policy addresses the risk of temperature-rise, while remaining flexible and offering no regrets. Our current, regulatory-heavy policy violates those standards.

Regulatory approaches and political subsidies are extremely inflexible. Witness the struggle to stop subsidies for corn-based ethanol, which actually increased carbon emissions. We have wasted huge amounts of money on failed policies. The billions that went to prop up failed solar companies and costly new EPA regulations have done little to reduce emissions, but they have damaged the economy and taken money from other priorities.

The smart, flexible approach is a carbon price combined with tax cuts and elimination of costly and ineffective regulation.

Whatever the impact of climate change, high or low, this approach frees the economy from the weight of regulation. It puts fewer dollars in the hands of Russia and Iran. It reduces the risk of serious climate impacts.

Sadly, none of this will happen. Promoting costly and extreme climate regulation offers left-wing politicians a symbol of environmental sincerity—even if their policies don't actually work. Opposing any taxes, even Reaganesque tax reform, offers right-wing politicians a symbol of commitment to fight extreme environmentalism—even if it sacrifices opportunities to reduce regulation and weaken our international opponents.

The political value of climate policy isn't in addressing the risk (large, small or nonexistent). It is in the political benefits that accrue to politicians who take symbolically powerful, but practically meaningless, positions.

Todd Myers (@WAPolicyGreen) is environmental director at the Washington Policy Center in Seattle and author of "Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism is Harming the Environment." He also serves on the Washington state Salmon Recovery Council.

ENLARGE

Forget Global Warming. Waste Management Is the Big Problem.

JOHN HOFMEISTER: Based on what we know in the 21st century, it is time to come to grips with waste management. We know now better than ever before that there are too many wasting too much everywhere all the time. The man-made burdens on the earth's land, water and air are diminishing the natural ability of the earth to restore itself. It isn't socially acceptable to impose the burden of our own waste on another person. We pay to properly dispose of such waste. The same principle needs to be applied to all forms of waste, including physical, liquid and gaseous waste from all sources.

The days of emitting waste free need to end. Such a freebie is irresponsible to one another and on a global scale simply unacceptable. China's waste washing up on our Pacific coast, poisoning fish in the ocean we share and impacting the quality of the air we breathe is wrong. Likewise we impact our near neighbors in like manner, unless we don't because it's forbidden and enforced. The only way to take waste seriously and therefore to do something about it is to price it, where the money goes to disposal and remediation. We're already part way there, paying to protect land, water and air. So why don't we go the rest of the way and price waste to reduce and ultimately eliminate it as part of a competitive marketplace?

Public policy makers tend not to talk about waste management. It's insufficiently grandiose, when compared with climate change. But they should because waste management is the fundamental issue. We'll never deal with climate change from a public-policy perspective. It's too big, too controversial, too ambiguous and too long-term to deal with in any meaningful public-policy methodology. But we know how to deal with waste. We've been doing it successfully for years. I'm suggesting now to go the distance. Set the waste-management policy in motion to do more, to clean up after ourselves completely, using technology, growing an industry, creating jobs to do just that. It isn't grand but it works. Our progeny will be forever grateful.

John Hofmeister (@cfaenergy) is former president of Shell Oil Co. and founder and head of Citizens for Affordable Energy. He is also a member of the U.S. Energy Security Council.

ENLARGE

Wanted: A Climate Solution for Developing Countries

ROBERT RAPIER: Although climate change will continue to be a topic that arouses passions on both sides, it is indisputable that the world is conducting a giant experiment on the global atmosphere for which the ultimate outcome is unknown. As an engineer well versed in risk management, I consider this situation to be unacceptable to say the least.

There are a number of things the world should be doing to address this, but for various reasons we aren't effectively addressing it. Despite all the angst and media attention, global carbon-dioxide emissions set a record high in 2012, and projections are that emissions will continue to rise.

According to the 2013 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 1.1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide have been released to the atmosphere since 1965 from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. is responsible for 25% of the total, while China's share is presently 13% and growing.

The real challenge is that even though the U.S. has the largest share of legacy carbon-dioxide emissions, in the years ahead this problem is going to be increasingly driven by developing countries. Many of these countries are committing themselves to decades of new carbon-dioxide emissions by building new coal-fired power plants. In fact, globally there are 1,200 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board. These proposed plants cover 56 countries, but 76% of those being proposed are in India and China.

In order to address the carbon-dioxide problem, we either have to develop low-cost, convenient, and scalable sources of power, so that developing countries can continue to develop (otherwise they will continue to develop with coal), or we have to find a way to start sucking a trillion metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it. There are some strategies for sequestering carbon, but so far none that can significantly impact the problem.

Otherwise, we can all just hope that the worst-case projections are wrong. But "hope" should be our last resort in this case.

Robert Rapier (@RRapier) is chief technology officer and executive vice president at Merica International, a forestry and renewable energy company. He serves as managing editor for Energy Trends Insider and is chief consultant for Energy Trends Group.

ENLARGE

How Americans Live Is the Global Model. So Let's Change How We Live

AMY MYERS JAFFE: As the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares to release its fifth report, Americans will be looking to the federal government for a response. The scientific community will reiterate the call for a Manhattan-style program on research and development of carbon-abatement technologies. And impassioned advocates can push for regulatory means to radically decarbonize the fuels we use. But with pressing economic recessionary issues still looming large on the political landscape, we also need to move away from the idea that social investment in R&D is going to take us 100% of the way there. We need to move to a different mind-set: How do we live and is it sustainable?

The U.S. remains in an enviable position in soft power terms. Citizens all around the planet are using our smartphone technology, watching our movies, following our media. What we buy and how we live are material to what others aspire to do. In other words, U.S. lifestyle choices matter.

The U.S. consumes twice as much energy per capita as Japan, 1½ times as much China, and 14 times as much as India and central Africa. The U.S. represents 5% of the world's population, but we consume roughly 20% of global oil production. Instead of waiting for a breakthrough in a carbon-free energy source, fundamentally we need rethink how we use energy, no matter the source. That sounds preachy at first glance but there are pockets in the U.S. where innovative things are being tried (as well as in places as diverse as Iceland, Abu Dhabi and China).

The push to localized energy is often accompanied by early adoption of energy efficiency and smart-meter technologies, which can also tap local non-oil sources and waste-to-energy options. More communities need to investigate this path which offers resiliency benefits as well. Millennials, to their credit, are driving less, and when they do drive, they are more inclined than their baby boomer parents to car share. This mind-set shift is critical, as transportation represents almost a quarter of total greenhouse-gas emissions. It may be trite to say that thinking locally can have global impacts, but we have to start somewhere and giving due credit to soft power is an excellent option in the control of every individual.

Amy Myers Jaffe (@AmyJaffeenergy) is executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management. She was formerly the director of the Energy Forum at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

ENLARGE

Climate-Change Initiatives Need a Better Roadmap

IVÁN MARTÉN: The volume of greenhouse gases emitted by humans keeps growing. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is already around 400 parts per million (ppm) and close to the critical zone of 500 ppm, the point at which the consequences for our planet are unknown and potentially irreversible, according to climate-change experts.

Although international agreements aimed at tackling climate change are failing, the issue is still on the agenda of governments and companies because the risks of inaction are huge. As President Barack Obama said in January 2013, "We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations."

Public and private stakeholders should develop strategies to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions for two main reasons. First, climate change is a serious risk for our planet. Second, on the positive side, such actions can help generate new businesses that may contribute to economic growth and create jobs.

World-wide, the rise in greenhouse-gas emissions has been driven by population growth and economic development that, by necessity, increases the energy intensity (energy consumption/GDP) and the carbon intensity (CO2 emissions/energy consumption) of nations. Mitigation measures, therefore, should be focused on lowering the energy and carbon intensity of social and economic development, especially in developing economies.

National, regional and local authorities, as well as companies, should face up to this challenge with a really structured approach. They should define road maps for mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions that fit their needs and context without losing sight of their goals. Climate-change policies should incorporate detailed inventories of greenhouse-gas emissions and solid abatement strategies, as well as plans that help to adjust to the new energy context.

Such road maps should include abatement scenarios that prevent damage to economic and social development and that promote technological change. Abatement technologies must be prioritized according to both their potential and feasibility, and both over the long and short term. Authorities and companies should start considering renewable technologies like wind, solar and bioenergy that have already proven to be technically and economically feasible, as well as energy-efficiency measures in the power generation, residential, industrial, and transportation sectors. In the long term, greenhouse-gas abatement technologies such as carbon capture and storage will become more feasible, both technically and economically.

Iván Martén is a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. He has been the global leader of BCG's energy practice since 2008 and previously was the European leader of the practice.

Carbon Pricing Is the Best First Step to Address Global Warming

MARK THURBER: The essential first step is to put in place a functioning carbon price. Europe has had this since 2005 in the form of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). California, Québec, British Columbia, Australia and New Zealand have all recently established carbon pricing of one sort or another. South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland appear to be moving toward carbon markets. Even China has started pilot carbon trading in Shenzhen, and it plans to add programs in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangdong and Hubei.

If these markets are successful—that is, if they establish a moderately stable, nonzero carbon price without causing undue negative economic impact—this regional, "bottom-up" approach to global carbon policy could supplant the original Kyoto Protocol vision of a unified, global cap-and-trade. And by linking together, as California and Québec, and Europe and Australia, plan, regional schemes could reduce costs and establish global reach. On the other hand, high-profile failures in these nascent carbon markets could kill the current momentum for carbon pricing.

Because successful implementation of carbon pricing is so crucial, we are devoting a lot of effort in our research group to understanding how carbon markets can fail—and what market rules would reduce the risk of such failures.

Mark Thurber is associate director at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. His research focuses on the role of state-owned enterprises in fossil-fuel production, as well as how to deliver energy to low-income populations.

JEFFREY BALL: Global warming is fundamentally harder than past environmental problems. Unlike smog or litter or dirty rivers, it's global, long-term and largely invisible. The upshot: Solving global warming is the top priority of essentially no one (save a relative handful of scientists and environmental activists).

That suggests two basic principles for fighting global warming. First, the steps that will be most politically feasible are those that happen to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the process of doing something that people care more about: Cleaning the air, or producing jobs or making money. Second, in contrast to the approach taken thus far, the steps that make the most sense are the ones that are most economically efficient.

A third basic principle is equally important: Technological breakthroughs are hard to predict. So it's unwise to ground any strategy to curb global warming on the expectation that a particular technology will get big enough and cheap enough to be a main fix.

Those three basic principles are pretty general. They point to two more-specific approaches:

Focus on the biggest sources of greenhouse-gas emissions. That includes a handful of gases produced in industrial processes that, pound for pound, pack a far heavier global-warming punch than does carbon dioxide. As for carbon dioxide, it means focusing on China, the world's biggest emitter and a place that has an incentive to clean up its energy system that most people see as far more compelling than global warming: dirty air.

And when governments around the world spend money to promote cleaner energy, it's worth structuring those subsidies to reward not specific predetermined technologies, but whichever technologies over time end up able to produce the most environmental gain at the lowest cost.

Jeffrey Ball (@jeff_ball), formerly The Wall Street Journal's environment editor and a longtime energy reporter at the paper, is scholar-in-residence at Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, a joint initiative of Stanford's law and business schools. He writes about energy and heads a project exploring the relationships among countries in the globalizing clean-energy industry.

ENLARGE

Let's Upgrade Our Insurance Policy on Climate-Change Risk

KATE GORDON: Climate change presents potentially catastrophic risks to our economy. If you don't believe me, ask someone who just went through Colorado's historic floods, or superstorm Sandy, or the Yosemite Rim Fire. In fact, a recent study from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that climate change played a role in half of 2012's extreme weather events, and doubles the annual probability of Sandy-like flooding in New York City.

These kinds of events are crippling our tourism industry and causing Americans to lose their homes and livelihoods. As if that isn't bad enough, they also threaten to break the backbone of our economy: our energy and fuel infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Energy recently published research that found that our energy infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events, which are only made more frequent and more severe by climate change. Residents of San Francisco recently experienced just such vulnerability when a raging wildfire near world-renowned Yosemite National Park threatened the city's electricity supply and forced a state-of-emergency declaration from Gov. Jerry Brown.

Secretary of State George Shultz once advised President Ronald Reagan to "take out an insurance policy" against the risks posed by a depleted ozone layer—advice that helped lead to the Montreal Protocol, widely considered the most successful environmental treaty in history. Mr. Shultz has publicly called for a similar "insurance policy" to mitigate the risks of climate change. He isn't alone: The reinsurance industry also recognizes the financial folly of failing to prepare for a changing climate of risk, and has told Congress as much. The Pentagon, used to dealing in long-term threat assessment, also recognizes the potential for new geopolitical uncertainties associated with climate-induced migration or resource scarcity, and concluded in a major strategic review that climate change will act as "an accelerant of risk and conflict."

In most sectors that face such potential calamity, including low-probability but high-cost events, we act accordingly by buying insurance, undertaking threat assessments, and operationalizing the risk in our everyday investment, financial and policy decisions. We need to do the same for the risks posed by climate change. And then, risk assessment in hand, we need to act to do something about it.

Kate Gordon (@katenrg) is the vice president and director of the energy and climate program at Next Generation. She previously served as vice president for energy and environment at the Center for American Progress.

Stop the deniers, stop being destructive, insulate your house, adopt a carbon tax, etc, etc. These are EXPERTS? This has been going on for over 40 years and we are repeating this same stuff over and over. Emissions and concentrations keep rising faster and faster. Now is the time to get real and face the fact that emissions will continue to grow exponentially for many years. Adaptation and continued growth to help the poorest face an unknowable future is our best hope. Above all, don't listen to the "doomsday crowd".

What consensus are you talking about? You have a gaggle of brain-washed pseudo-scientists, all convinced that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming up the world. Well, it isn't, and I could have told you so if you had bothered to ask me. Let's start from today. Right now, there is more carbon dioxide in the air than ever before in recorded history but there is no warming at all. Your "experts" will tell you that as OLR (outgoing longwave radiation) passes through that cloud of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it gets absorbed, the absorbed energy warms the gas, and thereby creates that greenhouse warming we are told to fight with those emission control rules. Fact is, that OLR is not being absorbed and goes straight through the CO2 barrier into outer space. That is simply an observed fact they are all trying to pretend just does not exist. They have invented many absurdities to try to hide it but my favorite is a learned article in Nature claiming that the missing heat is hiding in the ocean bottom. Your so-called "experts" side-step it entirely and go on to babble about what should be done about that imaginary greenhouse warming, not seen for the last 15 years. This is still not the true extent of the missing heat. Satellite records tell us that there was another no-warming period starting in 1979 that lasted for 18 years, giving us a total of 34 years since 1979. And those pro-warming groups are not above changing official temperasture records either when they want to show warming where none exists. For exanple, if you try to find that earlier pause in warming I referred to on a non-satellite temperature curve you will discover that they show you a warming instead that does not exist in the eighties and nineties. When I was doing research for my book "What Warming?" I saw that this so-called "late twentieth century warming" was bogus and said so in the book when it came out. For two years nothing happened but then GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC, all in unison, decided to stop showing this warming and brought their data into line with satellites. This was done secretly and no explanation was offered. It is highly unlikely that any earlier warminng when carbon dioxide was lower could have been greenhouse warming. This absence of greenhouse warming is still a mystery to the IPCC because their Arrhenius theory of the greenhouse effect is incomplete. Ferenc Miskolczi [1] has corrected that and his theory of greenhouse gases handles all simultaneously absorbing greenhouse gases while the Arrhenius theory only handles one. He published his theory in 2007 and was immediately attacked by ignoramuses in the blogosphere. But no peer-reviewed objections have appeared and in 2010 he found a way to prove his theory experimentally [2[ by using existing data. NOAA has a database of weather balloon observations going back to 1948. He used it to study the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time and discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of this substantial amount of CO2 to air had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmoosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. Hence, predictions of doomsday warming based on the greenhouse effect are all invalid. And emission control laws passed with their help were passed under false premises and must be voided. With that, the current warming pause is explained as the normal state of the atmosphere, variously hidden from us by bogus warming or once in a century events like the super El Nino of 1998.

Hey WSJ, you forgot to bring Al Gore to your panel of "experts"! Has your newspaper ever explained what happened to Ice Age in the 70's? Well, at least if you were to follow history, human civilization seems to thrive during warmer spells and goes dormant during cooling phases. From the fairness perspective, I deserve to have palm trees in my backyard in Virginia.

Science is not dogmatic and is always skeptical. It challenges assumptions. "Consensus" is certainly not science. If that were so we would still be curing disease by using leeches to balance the humuors. After all, that was the consensus for centuries. A few skeptics caused that to change. They were scientists.

Global warming alarmism is necessarily based on models. Not one of these models has been successfully predictive. A scientist would discard a model like that and challenge the very premise of the model. Dogma based on consensus will never challenge anything, especially models that keep the money flowing.

It would have been nice if the author had talked to someone who knew something about global warming, or the mechanics behind what the "alarmist" are trying to pull over everyone.

Having said that, do I think we should continue burn fossil fuels unabated? No. We should be looking for alternative sources of non-carbon energy, but NOT while destroying the world economy and raises taxes to make everyone's life miserable to literally line the pockets of Al Gore and other "alarmist" gougers.

Todd Myers seems to be about the only one who put any thought into this:TODD MYERS: The consensus among scientists is that humans "contribute to," not cause, global warming.

Only he's wrong, global warming didn't start in 1860, but after the last ice age, which was long before that.

All the commentators were trying to stop "Global Warming" or "Climate Change". What if it can't be stopped? What if "change" is just what climate does (and has been doing throughout Earth's history)?

Humans have never been good at controlling the environment. But one thing we HAVE been good at, is adapting to it. If we're so sure that the earth is warming up, we should be trying to figure out how to survive on a warmer Earth (or cooler Earth, as "Climate Change" allows it to go either way).

There's lots of evidence that 1st world countries survive natural disasters better than 3rd world countries. Our buildings are stronger and we can more quickly get help to where it's needed. For instance, death tolls from earthquakes in the US are tiny compared to those in Pakistan or Turkey where houses are largely built of mud or brick. Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved if the Boxing Day Tsunami has occured in the Pacific rather than Indian Ocean due to the early warning system that is already in place there. Rather than keeping 3rd world countries down by keeping cheap energy from them, we should encourage their adoption of new technology so they can better weather whatever the future holds.

These "experts" (Darryl Hannah?! An EXPERT?!) seem unaware of fundamental, verifiable facts that mean human-generated carbon dioxide cannot account for more than a minor fraction of the observed global warming.

The discussion and accompanying citations is too cumbersome to post here, but quite readable, and may be found at:

I guess I am more in favor of doing NOTHING about global warming. Let us just stop this total bull.

What I am in favor of is enabling local authorities and businesses to work together on a community level to cut pollution and waste, find and design innovative ways to recycle, and protect the fresh-water supplies.

I just don't see this as a global problem. What I do think, as a conservative, that companies need to work closely with their local governments to find cost-effective ways to design and implement new technologies to improve their local environments while growing their businesses.

CO2 concentrations in the Jurrasic period were half of the amount today...yet the temperatures were nearly 20 degrees hotter. CO2 concentrations during the start of the Silurian period were 35 times higher than they are today...yet it was an ice age.

500 parts per million is a tipping point? If so, why didn't 25,000 parts per million wipe out all life on Earth 439 million years ago? And why, exactly, did global warming happen when CO2 was low and stay there for 150 million years?

Over the past 562 million years, there is zero indicating that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere remotely correlates with the temperatures. High concentrations of CO2 have been both hot and cold, and so have low concentrations. There is no pattern, meaning that the real impact is something else. Just because they happen to coincide over a geologically tiny period is merely coincidence.

I think these "scientists" need to turn their PhDs back into their respective universities. They clearly have little expertise in anything beyond scare tactics.

The idea the some of these people are experts is harming the environmental movement. This global warming is a proven lie, yet the still see it a means to money and control over people's lives. They continue the lie why none of the predictions have EVER come true!

One day there will be a real environmental problem that they will cry about and no one will believe them!

How far left is the WSJ going to go? Consensus of scientists, No. Settled science, laughable. There is no such thing as settled in real science. Ever hear of peer review. No? Perhaps because it is not allowed when it comes to anthropological global warming. The Academy withholds tenure for the same reason.There are many other indications that this is a huge fraud. Ever study fraud patterns?

The lead in to the article states, "There's a consensus among leading scientists that global warming is caused by human activity." There is no such consensus. Please cite the primary source material (not an unscientific review of metadata) that supports this statement.

Hardly experts. A procession of the usual suspects--a ditzy failed actress trying to reinvent herself as the savior of mankind, some self-promoting academics trying to rise to crony capitalists, a notorious RINO, and 1.5 token skeptics.

The "experts" are lock-stepping along on the premise that CO2 even needs to be controlled. CO2 is a benign gas that is necessary for life. It is harmless, or beneficial. Nature recycles CO2 to carbonate rock. (CaCO3 = limestone. See the CO2 in there?)

The so-called "experts" clearly haven't run the numbers. Wind and solar cannot possibly contribute materially to base load power production in the foreseeable future. Natural gas producers will not continue for long to sell at below cost to electric generators--but the generators need those low prices to burn gas. Nuclear power is on a long and inevitable decline.

Politically, it seems that those who would expend $3 quadrillion ( 20 times the total savings of mankind) for such dubious benefits should bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the expense is justified. This they cannot do.

Manmade global warming has been exposed as a fraud. Anyone who continues to promote control measures must be assumed to be complicit in the fraud. Now is the time for serious persons to disassociate themselves from this scam and repudiate it.

We should remember those who fail to do so, so we can know whom to blame for the resulting self-inflicted misery..

No, there is NOT consensus about what is causing Global Warming because the latest data indicates, in fact, Global cooling. Please stop putting out incorrect rubbish that fuels the fire of the greatest political scam in modern history. Global Warming is nothing but a massive wealth transfer. This is NOT about the earth- it IS about Money, Control and Power.

The solution is to stop electing global warming deniers and hand over your Constitutional rights to the Government so they can regulate every facet of your life:

The type of car you can drive and how much you can drive it.The number of cows allowed on a farm because cows produce global warming gases.Permits (that cost $$$) to burn yard debris in the fall.etc, etc, etc.

The more ridiculous and onerous the better. Just look at California for a preview.

CO2 is a wonderful product of fossil fuel combustion. Our plants, trees, and vegetation need CO2 to thrive. Let us please do what we can to burn as much fossil fuel as possible to make a greener planet. Another wonderful and beneficial product of combustion is H2O gas. Let us all heat our homes with natural gas and fill up our cars more often and take more road trips. The H2O gas byproduct will inevitably precipitate as H20 liquid and increase the fresh water supply. There is a consensus among leading scientists that global warming and cooling is caused by fluctuations in solar activity, not the CO2 fluctuations that other leading scientists think causes global warming. Feel free to enjoy the use of natural gas, gasoline, propane, etc.

And you, Arno, are so much smarter than EVERY legitatate and significant Scientific academy in the world? And your one study by one author counters the thousands of studies by thousands of other authors who have reached very different conclusions?

Thomas, the models HAVE been successfully predictive. You seem to be ignorant of what they are and are not capable of, and the ability to gauge how successful they will be. There are always unknowns - and all the models recognize that. But the evidence is growing and strongly pointing in the direction of warming. the skeptical side should consider how much and what can we do about it - not "it's not happening". Your attitude is dogmatic, not skeptical.

The greenhouse effect has been around since the beginning of the planet. Without the greenhouse effect, we would have an average temperature of -18 degrees C (versus our comfortable +15 degrees C - a 33 degree C difference). We could also look at it from the perspective of our neighbors: Mars has little atmosphere and thus little greenhouse effect - the average temperature is -58 deg C whereas Venus's atmosphere is mostly CO2, and their temp is 452 deg C. So the greenhouse effect is a balancing act - humans are changing that balance. The earth will survive, but it will be less ideal for humans.

So when humans "contribute" to global warming, that does not mean it is OK. It is bad for humans.

You are making fallacious arguments. No one argues that raising CO2 levels will wipe out all life on earth (OK, perhaps a few crazy folks are - but not the general scientific community). But comparing CO2 levels to the Jurasic is rediculous. Humans did not exist during the Jurasic period.

The question is about forcings. There are many factors that force the climate one direction or another. Most of those factors are currently stable. CO2 is not. The climate is warming unusually quickly compared to the last 650,000 years (i.e. the time frame that humans and our current biological systems evolved in). Compared to millions of years ago is irrelevant, as we did not exist then. We can actually make pretty good estimates of the forcings for most of the last 650,000 years - we can only guess wildly before then.

The fact is that EVERY major scientific body agrees that we are changing the climate - mostly due to CO2, but also due to other greenhouse gases and land use changes. What makes us want to listen to your illogical rant and not EVERY major scientific body out there?

another one-fact mind. CO2 is but one factor that can drive climate change. you seem not to understand these drivers do not stay the same, so your argument focused on one simple driver at different times is simplistic and pretty irrelevant without an analysis of other prevailing conditions. (and seriously; "scientist", turn back their PhDs, "little expertise" ... what a loon)

John Garesche - don't put words into my mouth. I said nothing about any Scientific academy but now that you mention it, those scientific academies do mindlessly support the global warming dogma without an ounce of scientific research to support it They as well as you should study my comment carefully because it shows them the error of their ways and shows you what real climate science is about. I am a scientist and what you get from me is science, not pseudo-science they deal with. (P.S.: By windmills I meant those that Don Quijote tangled with, not the contraptions designed to kill birds. Those are still the favorites of CAGW true believers.)

These scientists have yet to explain to me why it's different this time over 180 data points when 560is million of them say otherwise. Running CO2 and temperatures through my copy of MiniTab actually comes out with a reverse - the higher the CO2, the colder it tends to be, with a correlation that is very close to being significant, which means the long term data suggests that increasing CO2 has nothing at all to do with "global warming", and much more likely to do with fluctuations from plant life growing from, you know, warmer environments.

Still, this "drivers" thing is a load of bull when I get statements like "500 parts per million is a tipping point from which we will never recover." Tell that to the Ordovican period where CO2 concentrations averaged 2,240 parts per million for over 80 million years. We passed that hypothetical tipping point a long time ago, yet here we are with glaciers.

Shoot, with the long-period loss of CO2 over time, I'd say we need to dump more into the atmosphere because we're dangerously close to returning to the same hyper-oxygenated environment that nearly wiped out all life on Earth 2.3 billion years ago. Me driving that F-150 could very well be saving Earth from being a desolate, over-oxygenated rock.

I still think they need to turn in their PhDs. These so-called scientists not only fail being scientists, nothing is ever settled, but they can't seem to grasp that what amounts to an insignificant blip on the geological timescale isn't a major disaster.

Given Michael Mann's refusal to disclose his foundational data, Al Gore's exaggerated Hollywoodish movie, and ClimateGate, it is not much of a stretch to say much of the global warming argument has certainly relied upon bad faith to advance.

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